Kindle 3 Weight

I’ve had some time to play around with my new Kindle 3 and to read what other users are saying so now I’m ready to publish this follow up with some of the information I’ve recently gathered of forgot to publish before.

In case you haven’t read reviews I’ve published before, here they are:

• Original Kindle 3 review (July, 29th) - largely based on official Amazon press release, other online sources and personal speculations.
• Kindle 3 review round-up from online media (August, 6th) – summary of opinions from sources like CNET, PCWorld etc.
• Kindle 3 review (August, 28th) – my personal hand-on review of the device with battery life estimations, screen contrast comparison, partial disassembly and other useful bits of information.

One thing I would like to mention specifically is the weight. I weighted the device on a digital scale it showed 8.2 oz. At first I though that my scale was off but then reports and pictures started surfacing on forums indicating that Kindle 3G + WiFi weights as low as 8.1 oz and Kindle WiFi as low as 7.8 oz. Official Amazon specs indicate 8.7 oz for 3G + WiFi and 8.2 oz for WiFi only version.

Kindle 3 software

Kindle 3 runs software version 3.0 (515460094) and has serial number starting with B006 marking it as new hardware series. No surprise there. In the past Amazon has stopped updating 1.* firmware for first generation Kindles once Kindle 2 came out. Hopefully this is not going to be the case with Kindle software 2.* despite the fact that apparently Kindle 3 will clearly outsell Kindle 2 soon enough (more on that later).

Kindle 3 is much more similar to second generation Kindle than Kindle 2 was to original Kindle 1. Kindle 2 user base now is much larger than Kindle 1 user base was when Kindle 2 came out. It would be easier for Amazon to maintain one code branch than two (since it seems that 1.* software development is essentially non-existent). Unicode characters have been added to 3.0 software. Eventually books in Kindle store will start using these characters. It would be very bad PR for Amazon when people with older Kindles will start buying these books only to see empty boxes instead of characters. This is why I guesstimate that eventually 3.* software will make it to Kindle 2 and older Kindle DX devices. Perhaps it would be software 3.1 or 3.0.1

There are several new features in Kindle software 3.0 that I forgot to mention in the original review:

• Device password. You can set a password that will be required to use the device every time it’s turned on. Without the password it’s impossible to access Kindle UI or Kindle USB drive. It’s pretty useful if you keep sensitive work related documents on your Kindle. In case you forget your password, it is possible to completely reset the device deleting all stored information in the process.
• Collections. Although these are not exactly new and have been around before Kindle 3, I’ve never taken the time to write about them and would like to point this feature out. Historically all Kindle books were piled in one flat list that was sorted by last-read date, title or author. Best way to navigate it was searching. Several months ago Amazon has introduced collections as a way to organize your library. A collection is similar to a tag as one book can belong to several collections (Sci-Fi, H. G. Wells, “Favorite Books”, etc)
• Manually setting device time. Previously Kindle relied on time information from 3G wireless network. Now you can manually set Kindle clock if you have WiFi-only version, don’t have wireless coverage or live on a different time than your GSM provider.

Kindle 3 Unicode support

Kindle 3 finally got a font with broader range of Unicode characters. These include Cyrillic, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese. I’ve done some quick tests and to me it looks like characters are there. However I didn’t do a full scale test of all possible characters from these planes. Some people on forums and in comments complained about poor support of Chinese and Korean but so far there has been little specifics.

There were some claims that non-Latin characters display the same in all typefaces. I’ve verified it and it does seem to be true for Asian characters and definitely not true for Cyrillic. Here are some screenshots showing different typefaces in Russian text.

Kindle 3 Russian Typefaces

By the way, good way to download and format Unicode text files so that paragraph breaks would display properly and lines will not needlessly wrap is eBook Text Formatter tool that I’ve created a while ago. It still works great.

Kindle 3 WebKit-based browser

New web-browser in Kindle 3 is great. It can event load and run desktop AJAX version of Gmail (however using mobile version at https://m.gmail.com/ is still recommended as it’s much faster). Some users reported problems with browser or apps. Kindle software would occasionally crash. It is generally believed that it’s caused by background indexing process running alongside browser. Whenever new book, text file or document is downloaded to Kindle, it is indexed to provide almost instantaneous search results. This process is resource intensive and may conflict with web-browser or word game applications that are available for Kindle.

Therefore it is recommended to refrain from browsing while Kindle indexes new books. Usually this process is completed within minutes of downloading a book or a document. If you download hundreds of books at once it may take hours and seriously drain your battery. 75% overnight battery drain has been reported after downloading 100+ books.

In case your Kindle browser stops working completely (“launch browser” button does nothing or causes a crash), restarting your Kindle will fix this problem. To restart your Kindle press “Home”, “Menu”, select “Settings”, press “Menu” and select “Restart”. In case this doesn’t work, holding the power button for 30 seconds and then releasing it does the trick. Please note that Kindle will not restart while you are holding the button. You need to press the button, slowly count to 30 and then release it. Within several seconds your Kindle will reboot.

Kindle 3 User Reviews

For some reason there were no user reviews for Kindle 3 on Amazon website until Saturday afternoon. Perhaps they were held in the pipeline for some reason. Now that reviews are finally in, you can check them out here.

For Kindle 3G + WiFi and Kindle WiFi there are 139 total reviews at the moment. Of these 104 gave Kindle 5/5 stars, 24 gave it 4 stars, 3 gave it 3 stars and 8 people were completely unhappy with their purchase and gave Kindle 3 one star. Since there so few one-star reviews, I took a look at them individually and here’s the scoop:

I would like to start completely quoting review by Roger: “The ipad has so much more functionality, why anyone would want to limit themselves to a Kindle is beyond me.” It doesn’t look to me like Roger ever had or will have a Kindle. Nonetheless he’s entitled to his own opinion and we’ll leave it at that :)

3 people seemed to have received defective devices. I can understand how this can lead to a bad review, however every device has a potential of being defective. When I started building servers of the first batch of 8 HDDs from a major manufacturer 3 failed within 24 hours of stress testing. Bad luck, I guess because since I replaced these 3 and installed dozens more like them I’m yet to see a single hard drive fail. So given the overall volume of Kindles shipped, 3 reviews about defective devices is pretty good.

One reviewer was extremely unhappy with quality of Korean font glyphs. Kindle 3 Unicode support is something that I want to investigate further. I’ll definitely report on it once I have the full story.

There is one bad Kindle 3 review dealing with new smaller buttons. Personally I liked Kindle 2 buttons more as well. New controller layout takes getting used to and judging by scarcity of negative reviews, benefits like WiFi and better screen greatly outweigh discomfort from smaller buttons. By the way there is a good old trick for reading from Kindle without having to use buttons at all: start text-to-speech, adjust the speech speed to your reading speed and then mute the volume. Pages will flip automatically.

User with “Book Worm” alias gave new Kindle 3 one star because he purchased Kindle 2 right before Kindle 3 was announced so the user ended up paying $259 for and older device rather than getting new one for $189. I can completely understand this frustration. Unfortunately Amazon doesn’t have a specific schedule of “surprise” product launches like Apple when everyone expects new iPhone to be announced in Spring and release in the Summer. Such things happened in the past when international Kindle or graphite Kindle DX was released. While it’s unlikely that anything can be done in this particular case, I would like to note that historically Amazon Customer support was quite flexible on 30-day return period. According to comments from several users you can get a refund (if the price dropped) or return your Kindle for a newer one up to one week after 30 days have passed from your purchase. But please don’t tell Amazon that I told you this :)

Final bad Kindle 3 review has something to do with the way user set up his/her account rather than with the device itself so I’ll not comment on it.

For these 8 negative reviews there are 128 positive reviews from people who are mostly extremely happy with their Kindle experience. Some highlights include:

• Small size and weight are mentioned in almost every positive review (and even some negative onces)
• Improved screen contrast and fonts is the second biggest thing mentioned in positive reviews.
• People love new low $189 price point of Kindle 3G + WiFi and $139 of Kindle WiFi.

In the future I’ll do a more detailed analysis of positive reviews and publish the stats here.

Kindle 3 Sales Numbers

On August 25th in the press release announcing early shipments of Kindle 3, Amazon also revealed that Kindle 3 is the best-selling product by four-week sales:

(NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon.com today announced that more new generation Kindles were ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe following any other Kindle launch, making the new Kindles the fastest-selling ever. In addition, in the four weeks since the introduction of the new Kindle and Kindle 3G, customers ordered more Kindles on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product, continuing Kindle’s over two-year run as the bestselling product across all the products sold on Amazon.com.

In the summer and amid slowing economy Kindle 3 was able to beat international Kindle 2 launch that was tied to the holiday shopping season last year. This is quite impressive but not surprising when one considers improved specs and features, price that got slashed in half and amount of customer awareness generated by previous launches.

Related Posts

• August 30, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Positive Reviews Summary (0)
• July 30, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review (29)
• July 25, 2010 -- Amazon’s Kindle Gets Even More Popular (3)
• June 28, 2010 -- Unicode Fonts Hack updated for Kindle Software 2.5.2 and 2.5.3 (3)

Being spread, as it is, between the Kindle device, iOS applications, Android applications, various smart phones, and PC applications, there are surprisingly few people left who cannot, should the choose to do so, access the eBook of their choice in a convenient and comfortable setting.  As some reports indicate that the eBook market has grown by more than 160% in the past year, this increasingly pervasive presence gives Amazon an impressive advantage and even further encouragement to keep the momentum up.  We already know that Kindle Editions are outselling hardcovers by a significant percentage these days, even if you exclude free eBooks from consideration and don’t exclude hardcover sales for books not available on the Kindle.  It’s starting to feel like this is only the beginning of a much larger trend, however, that could truly change the way we enjoy books.

Any thoughts?

Related Posts

• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)
• July 24, 2009 -- USA Today Adds Kindle Sales to Best Seller List (1)
• August 4, 2008 -- The numbers are in, Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindles so far (0)
• July 15, 2008 -- Kindle on the rampage, book sales double since May hitting 12% (2)

This move is also a great way for the USA Today to increase the influence of its best seller list.  For most people, best selling books is synonymous with with the New York Times Best Seller List.  The New York Times list the one recognized by Amazon (where Best Sellers are discounted) and most other retailers.  Not to mention the fact that you usually don’t see advertisers quoting a book’s position on the USA Today Best Seller List.  But by adding Kindle sales, the USA Today is trying to anticipate current trends and make headway against the Times list.  So far, the USA Today is the only publication to have done this, which might mean that their list will be more accurate.

Unless of course The New York Times already counts Kindle sales.  The data used to compile their list is a trade secret, so its possible they already include electronic sales and just haven’t told anybody.

Related Posts

• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)
• July 25, 2010 -- Amazon’s Kindle Gets Even More Popular (3)
• July 23, 2010 -- Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (8)
• August 15, 2008 -- New York Times Best Sellers: 15 August 2008 (0)

240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November 2007, according to TechCrunch, that’s what their source claims. We know that Amazon always stays coy about sales as part of its company policy so we may never get any conformation from Amazon about this.

TechCrunch says that their source is close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers, possibly the same source that claimed Kindle v2 is on it’s way this fall — we’ve yet to see any evidence of that prediction.

TechCrunch goes on to say;

Doing a little back of the envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers, and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in above $100 million so far. (Each $25 worth of digital reading material purchased per Kindle, add $6 million in total revenues).

From these numbers is appears that Kindle is already a profitable operation and has been so from the beginning, however, what we don’t know is whether after research and development costs have been factored in if the Kindle project overall is in profitability.

Wall Street has also came out with some new estimates;

Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., predicts that Amazon is on track to sell 500,000 to 750,000 more Kindles over the next four quarters (including this one). He estimates that Kindle owners will buy an additional $120 to $150 worth of books and other content for each device, bringing the total revenues over that time period to somewhere between $225 million and $355 million. Based on that, he values the Kindle as a $1 billion business for Amazon.

So by this time next year there could possible be over a million Kindle’s sold by Amazon. In May, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney was estimating that total sales of Kindle’s this year would only reach 189,000. The image below shows what he thought would happen. Turns out that his numbers were way off, that’s analysts for you! Its time for him to significantly revise his estimate.

240,000 Kindle’s shipped, would you call it a success? It certainly has proved the nay-sayers wrong, it’s proved Wall Street wrong as-well.

If the numbers are to be believed, then its a wonderful start for the Kindle, the revenue from hardware sales alone is an estimated $100 million. When you begin to add on book sales, Amazon looks like its earning some major money for its shareholders.

Source: TechCrunch

Related Posts

• May 24, 2008 -- $750 million a year estimate wildly off the mark? (1)
• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)
• July 25, 2010 -- Amazon’s Kindle Gets Even More Popular (3)
• July 24, 2009 -- USA Today Adds Kindle Sales to Best Seller List (1)

“on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles.”

That’s according to a Time magazine source inside Amazon, now consider that just two months ago Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sat down with with Walt Mossberg at “D: All Things Digital Conference” and said;

“Title-by-title basis…Kindle unit sales more than 6% of total book sales”

Incredible! A doubling of sales in the publishing industry is unheard of! in two months Amazon has managed doubled sales with a device which many critics claimed was not ready for prime time. The supply problems and pessimistic early reviews haven’t dented growth at all.

Which begs the question, have Kindle users started to purchase more e-books? and is that because e-books are significantly cheaper than their printed counterparts? or has Amazon been selling a stack load of Kindle’s, far more than previously thought.

Time magazine has a theory;

A couple of things could explain the uptick. The Kindle quickly sold out shortly after it was unveiled on Amazon at the end of 2007. However, the company recently cranked up supply to meet demand, and cut the price at the end of May from $399 to $359. Some analysts estimate Kindle sales at around 55,000 a month. At the same time, the Kindle is quirkier than your average gadget, and consumers are learning how to use it. It’s possible that as Kindle owners warm up to the gadget — and as the library of titles rapidly grows — they increase the rate of their purchases. We now return you to more scrutable data points…

So we are asking you, have to started to purchase more e-books for your Kindle now that you have had the device for a few months? or have you recently purchased the Kindle and was that because of the price drop?

Source: Time Magazine

Related Posts

• June 2, 2008 -- Business Like Bezos: Portfolio.com interviews Amazon founder Jeff Bezos about the Kindle (0)
• May 29, 2008 -- Jeff Bezos interview at the “D: All Things Digital Conference” (2)
• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)
• July 25, 2010 -- Amazon’s Kindle Gets Even More Popular (3)

We don’t all have a couple of spare hours every day, so if your just interested in what Bazos has says about the Kindle then you can skip most of the interview – Bazos starts talking about the Kindle in part 3 at 3min 25sec into the interview.

Partial Transcript by Wired.com:

Portfolio: Let’s talk about the Kindle. What do you want it to be?

Bezos: Any book, in any language, ever in print should be available in less than 60 seconds. We worked on it for three years. It’s been selling out since being released.

Portfolio: You sold how many?

Bezos: You asked that so innocently, but you know I’m not going to answer. We have a long-standing practice of being very shy about disclosure, and I’ll stick to that practice. The Kindle has substantially exceeded our expectations.

Portfolio: Every effort at e-books has failed. Why should this one work?

Bezos: We decided we were going to improve upon the book. And the first thing we did was try to determine the essential features of a physical book that we needed to replicate. The No. 1 feature is that it disappears. When you’re in the middle of reading, you don’t notice the ink or the glue or the stitching or the paper — all of that disappears, and you’re in the author’s world. Most electronic devices today do not disappear. Some of them are extraordinarily rude. Books get out of the way, and they leave you in that state of mental flow.

Portfolio: How do you improve on that?

You can watch the full interview 6 part interview here.

Source: Wired

Related Posts

• May 29, 2008 -- Jeff Bezos interview at the “D: All Things Digital Conference” (2)
• July 15, 2008 -- Kindle on the rampage, book sales double since May hitting 12% (2)
• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)
• July 25, 2010 -- Amazon’s Kindle Gets Even More Popular (3)

“At Simon & Schuster, we are excited by how many Kindle books we’re selling and the feedback from readers who want to read our titles on their Kindles. We have also learned that readers aren’t just looking for new or bestselling books, but also books that are older or hard to find,” said Carolyn Reidy, President and CEO, Simon & Schuster, Inc. “These are the books that have proven themselves to be of enduring interest, and we want readers to be able to find them anytime, anywhere. We are pleased to take another big step toward that goal by making this great percentage of our active backlist available on Kindle by the end of 2008.”

“Kindle is re-igniting a love of reading — after purchasing a Kindle, customers purchase, on average, just as many physical books, and their total book purchases on Amazon increase by 2.6x. Kindle books are also becoming a meaningful portion of Amazon’s overall book sales much sooner than we anticipated — of the 125,000 books available both as a physical book and on Kindle, Kindle books already account for over 6 percent of units sold,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “This commitment from Simon & Schuster moves us closer to our vision for Kindle, which is to make any book, ever printed, in any language available in less than 60 seconds.”

Simon & Schuster said that it will be doubleing their content available for the Kindle.

One particular sentence in the statement stood out to me;

…after purchasing a Kindle, customers purchase, on average, just as many physical books, and their total book purchases on Amazon increase by 2.6x

2.6 times! I’m sure the executives at Amazon are thrilled with this particular statistic, it could mean that the Kindle has been a profitable ‘experiment’ — as Amazon puts it — from day one. I have no doubt that Simon & Schuster, and other publishers, want to grab a piece of the action now that they are aware of just how many e-books Kindle owners are buying.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Related Posts

• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)
• July 25, 2010 -- Amazon’s Kindle Gets Even More Popular (3)
• July 7, 2010 -- Amazon Incentivizes Digital Discounts (2)
• June 10, 2010 -- AmazonEncore’s Fall Lineup (0)

Our old friend Walt Mossberg sat down with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos this morning at the “D: All Things Digital Conference”.

Walt Mossberg gave the Kindle a luke-warm reception back in November calling it “mediocre” and “marred by annoying flaws”. He liked the idea and the shopping experience behind the Kindle, but thought that the device itself was where Kindle’s flaw lied.

Jeff Bezos does his normal sales pitch about the Kindle, but this time he throws in a bit of new information about Kindle sales. Walt asks point blank “How many Kindles have you sold?” Jeff politely refused to answer the question instead he gave us a new stat: “Title-by-title basis…Kindle unit sales more than 6% of total book sales”. So of the 125,000 titles available for Kindle, of all those 125,000 titles that were sold — digital and print — Kindle accounted for 6% of sales. Jeff also said he envisioned a time when e-book sales formed a substantial portion of book sales at Amazon.

Jeff Bezos also commented on a Kindle v2:

“There will be a second version, a third version, a tenth version. … but a second version is not that near.”

It may take a decade to get the product to where Amazon wants it, he said. So this has confirmed what many thought, that Amazon is committed to the Kindle and there will be a Kindle v2 release sometime in the future.

The interview wasn’t just limited to talk about the Kindle, Bezos also talks about the streaming video-on-demand service for Amazon, which will be released in the next couple of weeks amongst other things.

You can see the interview below in 2 parts.

Source: All Things D

Related Posts

• June 2, 2008 -- Business Like Bezos: Portfolio.com interviews Amazon founder Jeff Bezos about the Kindle (0)
• July 15, 2008 -- Kindle on the rampage, book sales double since May hitting 12% (2)
• December 15, 2007 -- Walt Mossberg on the Kindle (2)
• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)

This is what Scott Berry thinks:

Citi’s Mahaney has even gone so far as to suggest 3% of Amazon’s revenue (about $750M) will come from Kindles within 2 years. Worse yet, he assumes a sales ramp roughly half of the original iPod. Frankly, he’s smoking crack.

If Eliot Spitzer hadn’t brought an end to the practice some years ago (cough, cough), I’d almost think these two were trying to drum up business for their investment banks. Instead it’s probably something much more innocent, like say pumping the stock for the traders.

Strong comments indeed, lets take a look at the reasons why Scott Berry thinks like this:

Think about it: what problem is the e-book solving for consumers?

1. Gee, if only my book was portable, I could take it with me…
2. Pushing a button to bookmark my place is SO much easier than bending a page corner.
3. Those nasty paper cuts.
4. I can take my whole library with me. (Sure, I often read 10 books at a time. And I wish I could read fast enough to finish several books on a long flight.)
5. I can download a new book whenever I need one. (Yep. And how long does that take over a pokey wireless link? EVDO isn’t everywhere. And can I read the first page while the rest is downloading?)
6. It’s cheaper. (True, true. Unless you want to read blogs at $2/week or newspaper feeds at $15/month. That’s a lot to pay for portability.)

The first three points are quite sarcastic, and don’t add to his argument – I don’t think Scott Berry understands the concept behind the ebook. Point 4 sounds like a positive thing to me. Point 5 brings into question whether Scott has even used a Kindle before? On point 6, he is right about the blogs and newspapers being overpriced, $2 a week for a blog feed and up to $15.99 a month for a newspaper subscription is a bit pricey, but I wouldn’t call these ‘problems’ with the e-book concept.

Scott Berry’s arguments boils down to this: He thinks the entire e-book concept is a dud and wont take off and form the sound of his argument it look like he hasn’t seen, let alone used a Kindle before. Berry hasn’t spoken to anyone who has owned a Kindle, if he had he would have noticed that the vast majority of Kindle owners actually love the device, and there are rave reviews up on the Kindle discussion forums. Even may critics changed their minds once they got their hands on the actual device. And I also think he’s missing the bigger picture, the fact that it is Amazon behind the Kindle, you know, one of the biggest book retailers on the planet.

In time we will find out who is right and who is wrong, I suspect it is going to be Mr. Berry.

Source: SeekingAlpha, Mobileread Forums

Related Posts

• August 4, 2008 -- The numbers are in, Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindles so far (0)
• July 17, 2008 -- Kindle “Still Too Expensive for Mass Acceptance” (2)
• May 19, 2008 -- $750 Million in Kindle Sales by 2010 (4)
• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)

We have all heard this past week that Amazon is expected to shift around 189,000 – 600,000 units by the end of the year – then 2.2 million units by 2010, but how does this compare with other similarly ‘revolutionary’ devices in their first year in the market?

Silicon Ally Insider has compiled the numbers for us and as we can see from the comparison – if Amazon manages to hit expectations – it puts the Kindle in the same league as the first generation Blackberry’s and iPod’s. Now consider that the Blackberry and iPods are leaders in their field were both met with the same ridicule and suspicion that the Kindle is facing today. So if Amazon keeps plugging away, ignores the critics and keeps improving the device, by the time we get to the 3rd generation Kindle those reports which claimed that the Kindle will be the next iPod might not be so wrong after all.

Also of note might be Zune sales, which after a year sold just over 1 million units. (wiki)

Can Kindle really become the next iPod? please leave your thoughts and comments below.

Source: Silicon Ally Insider via Gizmodo

Related Posts

• September 24, 2009 -- E-book industry in one picture (0)
• July 1, 2010 -- Kindle Software Gets an AV Upgrade (0)
• April 10, 2010 -- Kindle App. vs. Apple iBook App. (5)
• March 4, 2009 -- Kindle For iPhone and iPod Touch (17)

Read the full statement by Mark Mahaney/Citigroup Investment Research below:

How Is Kindle Doing So Far In The Marketplace?

Our ability to answer this question is very limited. Amazon is the sole retailer of the Kindle and it has disclosed no information about its sales other than to say that it sold out in the first 5 1⁄2 hours. But we have pieced together four different clues to gain a sense of Kindle’s traction.

First, we note that Kindle has consistently been ranked among Amazon’s Bestsellers in its Electronics category. Ahead of the Apple iPod Nano, the Garmin GPS Navigator, and the Canon Powershot Digital Camera.

Second, we note that the Kindle has received a very large number of customer reviews. Per the exhibit below, we note that Kindle has received more customer reviews than any of the other Top 10 Bestselling items in Amazon’s Electronics category – 2,537 reviews as of May 12th – vs. 663 for the Apple iPod Nano 4GB Silver (3G), the #2 Bestseller. This is in part an unfair comparison. Kindle is a new product sold only on Amazon.com, while there are numerous versions of the iPod, and they are sold by numerous retailers. But still, the volume of reviews does indicate material traction for the Kindle.

Third, we see that the quality/tone of the customer reviews the Kindle is receiving is relatively positive. Below we compare the Star Rating Diffusion – 5 Stars vs. 4 Stars vs. 3 Stars etc… – for each of the Top 10 Bestselling Electronics Items on Amazon. What we see is that the Kindle actually receives fewer high scores than the other Bestsellers – 69% of its reviews are 4 or 5 Stars vs. an average of 80% for the other items. And it receives more low scores than the other Bestsellers – 22% of its reviews are 1 or 2 Stars vs. an average of 13% for the other Items. But for a Version 1 of a product “competing” against a several times iterated leading consumer electronics item like the iPod, a 69% Star 4 or 5 rating is relatively positive.

And fourth, we note that the most reviewed Customer Review of Kindle (“Why and how the Kindle changes everything” by Steve “eBook Lover” Gibson) has been reviewed by at least 27,000 people. Specifically, as of May 13th, 26,931 have read Steve Gibson’s review and actually commented on it by pressing the Yes or No button when asked if the review was helpful. And logically, there would be more people who read the review and didn’t bother to vote, although the voting step is hyper-easy. We believe that this helps provide something of a proxy for how many Kindles have likely been sold. We’d peg the number as somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Kindles sold to date.

The numbers look about right to us, what do you guys think?

For Amazon to hit the $750 million in sales figure a few assumption have to be made. The figures are based on the assumption that sales will grow from 189,000 units by the end of 2008 then to 2.2 million units by 2010 and that Amazon will drop the price to about $300.

Source: Silicon Ally Insider

Related Posts

• May 24, 2008 -- $750 million a year estimate wildly off the mark? (1)
• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)
• July 25, 2010 -- Amazon’s Kindle Gets Even More Popular (3)
• July 24, 2009 -- USA Today Adds Kindle Sales to Best Seller List (1)

That prompted Schnittman to look at his royalty statements, which he said “stunned” him: He had expected to sell up to 200 Kindle titles in December, but says the real numbers were “an order of magnitude” more than that.

Schnittman says that a buddy from ‘one of the biggest trade publishers in the world’ called him this week and explained to him how well the Kindle formatted eBooks were selling. In light of this news Evan Schnittman went to look at his royalty statements which “stunned” him. Schnittman says he has no idea if these kinds of sales will continue, but says that this has turned him from a digital skeptic into a digital believer and with sales figures like that it’s no wonder he’s a believer now!

With all this success, it raises the bigger question – How many eBooks does Amazon sell each month?

Please leave a comment if you have any questions or thoughts.

Source: Silicon Alley Insider

Related Posts

• August 29, 2010 -- Kindle 3 Review Follow Up (9)
• July 25, 2010 -- Amazon’s Kindle Gets Even More Popular (3)
• July 24, 2009 -- USA Today Adds Kindle Sales to Best Seller List (1)
• August 4, 2008 -- The numbers are in, Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindles so far (0)